As a startup lawyer, I’ve had so many amazing founders come across my desk and they’re creating ideas and bringing them to life that are going to change the world.

One thing they forget to think about is the equity of their company and their cap table. I think the reason for it is because most founders think, you know, I can just deal with that later.

So what happens down the road is they end up coming to me, their startup lawyer, and yeah, I can get your ducks in a row. Yeah, I can fix things. But you know what? It’s going to cost you time and money. The best thing you can do is get your cap table and your equity in order early. Build that foundation that leads you to success. And today, that’s exactly what we’re here to do.

I’m Natasha, and I’m in business development at Carta. And in this course, we’re going to teach you the basics of how to build your cap table. All right.

So let’s say you’re starting a company before you can do the fun stuff, like building a team and a product, you have to do a bunch of the other stuff, like boring logistical stuff. You’ve got to choose an entity type. You’ve got to legally create your company. And most importantly for this course, you’ve got to create your company’s cap table.

So what’s a cap table and why should you care about it? If your company’s capital structure is like the whole solar system, then you can say your cap table is like the sun. With a cap table, you’ll keep track of every single person or entity that owns a piece of your company. Kind of like a big fancy list of who owns what. Which sounds pretty easy, right?

Over time, your company grows, and as your company grows, you’ll start issuing all different kinds of equity ownership, from shares to rights to ownership to different people that are involved in the business like employees, investors and advisors. And all of these shares that you give to, people are going to have different types of complex rules attached to them. So long story short, your cap table can get pretty complicated pretty fast and it doesn’t have to stop there. At the end of the day, the consequences of having a poorly managed cap table are the exact things that startup founders have nightmares about.

So welcome to the Cap Table 101, by Carta from all of us on our team. We’re so excited that you’re here.